Businesses losing millions due to poor customer support on mobile
Australian businesses are losing millions in revenue because of poor service and substandard customer experiences when using mobile phones, leading to users cancelling or not renewing their subscriptions or agreements.
The 2016 Effective Mobile Engagement Report warned that a vast majority of consumers used their mobile phone to find support from businesses, either via phone call or through an email, with 85% saying they would be unlikely to do business again with a company after a bad mobile experience.
“This shows that a dissatisfactory mobile experience will not just be a case of losing one or two sales occasionally, but potentially losing a customer for a long period – perhaps forever,” the report warned.
“No industry delivered a satisfactory experience to more than two-thirds of those who have contacted them via a mobile device.”
Ironically phone companies delivered the second lowest level of satisfaction, with just 50% of people happy with the outcome of their calls, while insurance companies came at the bottom of the list, with 47% of people satisfied with the phone support – a figure which dropped from 60% in 2015.
“More than four in 10 purchases are made via mobile devices – and the average consumer that does so makes hundreds of dollars in purchases via mobile devices each year,” the report said.
“Therefore, it is vital that organisations are fully aware of how a bad mobile experience can have a huge impact upon the likelihood of a return sale. Consumers demand a good and quick mobile experience or they will go elsewhere, now and in the future.”
Daniel Cran, APAC managing director for LogMeIn, which commissioned the survey, said that consumers appeared quick to make a company pay for a bad experience when using their mobile for support.
“42% of respondents regularly use their mobile device to research products before they are buying,” Cran said.
“For Australia and New Zealand, 91% of (customers) are likely to drop off if the experience through that mobile device is a bad one. That is pretty scary.
“And when you combine that with 53% (of customers) in the report (saying) they use a search engine to get answers to questions over using the actual company’s app itself, it really opens up the threat that if you are not getting this intentioned approach towards customers correct, two-thirds drop off and check out Google – the likelihood is they are going to find the answer they want but it could also (lead) to a competitor of yours.”
Cran said that the issue with many companies was that they often simply “bolted on” the mobile element of their engagement strategies, creating a framework that would let consumers down.
“You have got to do the due diligence to understand what your mobile strategy is; for so long it’s been just something that people bolted on as part of their wide strategy,” he said.
“But now we are seeing as part of this type of research, you have got to have a specific notion about what you want to achieve.”
He said that telcos performed particularly poorly because consumers held them to a higher expectation.
“It’s because you probably expect your phone company to be very good at mobile engagement because they are providing you with the device, he said.
“Australians think, ‘Well, you provide the device so surely you must have a great strategy to get me to where I need to get to’.”
He said that the massive drop in satisfaction in insurers was a reflection of the emotions that were often tied up with events when people used an app on a mobile to report an accident.
“The challenge is, compared to the rest of the world, it is still very much virgin territory. We are a highly adoptive region, so that is good on the one hand, but we are also a very critical region.
“We are a lot more critical when it comes to ditching a company for poor performance.
“77% of people in this region have stopped doing business with a brand after one bad experience and almost 50% of people feel it has actually got worse when it comes to getting the right person to get the right answer back and those numbers are notably higher than say, in the US which is a much more mature market.”
